My paper will attend to the emergence of the interpreter and the repositioning of the contemporary music score from a Deleuzian viewpoint. The manuscript of Unity Capsule is a highly detailed and labyrinthine one that embodies both resistance and provocation for the performer. In my paper I will explain the processes I embarked upon to learn Unity Capsule and adopt the Deleuzian interpretations of résistance and création to articulate the aesthetic and technical demands the piece places upon the player. As part of this process, I will also chart how the performer emerges from the score to challenge hierarchical preconceptions pertaining to the performer–composer relationship.

The perspective I will adopt in this paper is an autoethnographic one that will interleave film excerpts of Deleuze as himself, taken from his final project, the Abécédaire, directed by Pierre-André Boutang. Alongside, there will be a complete performance with technical demonstrations of the iconic and “impossible” Unity Capsule by Ferneyhough. This will include projections of my annotated score as well as explanations of my schematics and the conceptual trajectories that led me to my interpretation. My purpose is to open an interrogation into the score-object, the existence of the performer in this new territory, and the implications of such an immersive experience on collaborative practices in the future.